First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (16 page)

We walked north along the main street till we came to the area where the street ended up against the battlements. We stopped at a house I suspected would be the Chapmans’: the most odd-looking house of all of them. It looked slightly oval, as though it had been stepped on and slightly squashed. Mr Chapman was more at ease now that he was near home. He said his grandfather had built the house, using the bevelled ribs and clinker boards from the hull of an old sailing ship that had beached in a storm a hundred years ago. On one side of the roof was a widow’s walk: a small platform with a railing. From above the front door, the figurehead of the old ship protruded—it was of a carved mermaid, her upper body naked, her eyes blank, all of her badly in need of a coat of paint.

Mr Chapman threw the front door open and beckoned me inside. As I stepped in, a mottled Siamese cat let out a howl and raced away into another room. The house was quite dark, for the windows were small. A flickering
hurricane lamp hung from the ceiling, showing the bulge of the walls, which were adorned with nets and hand-harpoons. What with the ribbed walls and the smell of fish, it was like being inside the belly of a sea monster.

A small woman drying her hands on an apron came out of the room where the cat had run. She was on the plump side, and her soft face had an anxious frown on it. She took my hand and looked into my face.

“You poor boy,” she said. “Do you think you’ll be happy with us?” she said. She saw my confusion.

“Didn’t you ask him yet?” she said to Mr Chapman.

His eyes, which had been fairly settled, now began swinging around wildly, avoiding hers and mine. She shook her head in disbelief.

“What a man,” she said to me. “He’s completely hopeless. No wonder I have headaches.” Then she made me sit down on a wooden rocker, and she sat opposite. Mr Chapman stood by the little window.

“Andrew,” said Mrs Chapman. “I knew your Aunt Lizzie and I always liked her. Who knows what drives people to do the things they do? Anyway, the point is: how would you like to live with us? At least for now. You can take your time and have a look at us. Then it’s up to you if you want to stay.”

She seemed so kind and frowned anxiously. In fact, she was always frowning, as though she suffered from a constant, minor pain.

“Yes, I’d like to,” I said.

She smiled a big smile and for a moment her frown was gone. Even Mr Chapman was smiling, though when he saw me looking towards him, his eyes began swinging around.

At that moment, in spite of everything that had happened to me, I had a notion I might have found a safe place in a dangerous world. At last.

Later that afternoon, Mr Chapman went to the Commissioner’s for my suitcase and Mrs Chapman led me up the erratic staircase to my bedroom. She left me to look around while she went back to the kitchen to get on with making her fish stew for dinner. I had barely checked the room out when heavy feet pounded up the stairs and there was a rapping at my door.

I took a deep breath and opened it to two boys I knew must be the Chapmans. They were older than I, perhaps by three years, and wore the island clothing.

“I’m John,” said the bigger boy, “and he’s Jim. My mother says you’re staying with us.” They were ugly boys. John was taller even than his father, and strong looking. He had the same spotty face as his brother, Jim, but bristly black hair sprouted among the pimples.

The two boys looked me over for a moment. Each of them had light blue eyes.

“Come on outside,” said John.

The two ran downstairs and I trailed after them, and out through the front door into the hot street. They signalled me to follow and trotted along to a nearby house. John went to the front door.

“Smiley!” he shouted.

A lanky boy about their own age came out.

“This is our new brother,” John said.

They gave the boy a few seconds to look me over. Then off they ran with me following to another house where we went through the same ritual. Then to another house, and another. The children, mainly boys, would come out and look me over. Sometimes, I would see girls, or grown-ups peering out the window.

In this way, the Chapman boys introduced me to many of the schoolchildren on St Jude. Along the way, they showed me their favourite places: especially the end of the
pier, where they would go fishing for the elegant finger-fish. They pointed out the direction of the cove they used for swimming, just inside the breakers. They warned me never to be enticed outside the breakers into the deep water where hammerhead sharks lurked.

“Sharks never sleep, you know,” said John Chapman.

Our final stop on the way back was at The Motte. This time, John didn’t shout, but knocked on the door politely. The little girl with the solemn face opened it.

“This is our new brother,” John said.

She stared at me. Then tall, thin Mrs Hebblethwaite appeared behind her.

“Go back inside,” she said to the girl. She looked angry—maybe even a little afraid.

“What do you want?” she asked John.

“This is our new brother,” he said.

“I’ve seen all I ever want to see of him,” she said and slammed the door shut in our faces.

John and Jim Chapman stood for a moment, then they both stuck out their tongues at the wooden door. They were as frightening to look at as a pair of pimply-faced gargoyles. All of a sudden, I liked them.

At dinner that first night at the Chapmans’, Mrs Chapman told me the family secret: that her husband should never have been a fisherman.

“He can’t bear to eat any of the fish he catches himself,” she said. She had to go down to the pier each day when the boats came back and exchange his catch for someone else’s.

“No wonder I have headaches,” she said.

The boys had obviously heard this before, and they laughed. And even Mr Chapman, though his eyes swung around wildly as she told me about his weakness, didn’t
seem too upset. I had the impression the two of them were fond of each other and of their boys.

And now of me too, I hoped.

But that Siamese cat I’d seen when I arrived wasn’t so soft-hearted. Sophie was her name, and she was always watching me with her cold cat eyes. She never failed to hiss if Mrs Chapman came too close to me, even to dish out my fish stew.

“Bad cat, Sophie!” Mrs Chapman said, but it had no effect. The cat just stood there on the floor near my chair, hissing and looking coldly at me as if she detected something in me the others were too innocent to see.

I
BEGAN ATTENDING
the one-room school in the battlements and enjoyed it just as much as I did in Stroven. Though, once in a while, something would happen to disturb my contentment.

The annual hiking expedition to the mountain took place after I’d been at school for a month. Twenty of us started out at nine in the morning led by our teacher, Moses Atkinson. He was a stringy man with long white hair and a grey beard that was just as long. His eyes weren’t so good, and he wore pebble glasses in wire frames. He’d been the teacher at St Jude for almost forty years.

The morning was warm as usual, and as we marched, the needle-flies accompanied us in brigades to taste the fresh blood of children. We went through the town, past the gate and up the path to the mountain: I hadn’t been that way
since the burning of the cottage. We’d stop every so often while Moses Atkinson, in his quavering voice, pointed out lava projections, the various cacti and other plants that were able to survive the rigours of the terrain.

I felt more and more uncomfortable as we came near the site of the cottage. Some of the boys were whispering and glancing at me. Then John Chapman came and walked beside me, and after that no one dared to look at me.

Moses Atkinson seemed uncomfortable too, and kept drawing attention to plants and land formations on the seaward side. But I couldn’t help looking at the ruins of the cottage. The roof had fallen in, but the walls were still standing, blackened by the fire. Everything wooden—doors, windows, floors—was gone. Already, weeds were sprouting all around the house; the little flower garden at the front was overgrown. At the back, monstrous potato plants with evil green leaves had thrust themselves up out of the imported soil.

We went round the shoulder of the mountain where we could no longer see the cottage. Now we were on the lower slopes and the path rose quite steeply. Moses Atkinson, who always wanted to be in front, was hobbling and wheezing loudly as we climbed.

“Be careful now,” he called out. “There are snakes up here.”

And sure enough, we could all see a small black snake with gleaming yellow eyes and flicking tongue lying on the path. It quickly slithered away.

“They lie out here in the mornings to soak up the sun,” said Moses Atkinson. “They do it instinctively.”

“What does instinctively mean?” one of the girls asked. It was Maria Hebblethwaite.

“It means something you’re born with,” said Moses
Atkinson. “Now take these snakes, for example. They don’t have to learn anything from experience. They’re born already knowing everything they need to know.”

The sun caught his pebble glasses as he said this, and I could have sworn he was looking directly at me.

We kept climbing. The path zigzagged up the mountain and ended at a little plateau near the one-thousand-foot mark. From there, we looked down over the island. All chatter ceased. I suppose the others were thinking what I was thinking: that we were tiny specks on a mountain on an island that was a speck in an ocean in a planet that was nothing but a speck in the universe.

I did all the things the other St Jude children did, including going to the dock each month to welcome incoming freighters. At first, I hoped one day the
Cumnock
might appear. But it never did. I couldn’t help hoping for even a letter from Harry Greene. It never came.

The Chapman boys loved swimming. During my first weekend with the family, they took me to meet a group of other boys at the swimming cove they’d shown me. I’d never learnt how to swim: the ponds around Stroven were much too cold. I was excited at the prospect. It was only when, along with the others, I peeled off my trousers and shirt that I remembered the purple stain. All the boys stared at it, some giggling, some looking disgusted. The Chapman boys were surprised too, for they’d never seen the mark before. But John came to my defence.

“What do you think you’re staring at?” he said to the others. Naked, he looked like a man, with his muscles, and his body all hairy even though he was only fifteen. I was so embarrassed, I picked up my shirt to put it back on.

“Keep it off, Andrew,” said John Chapman. “That mark will scare the sharks away!” He laughed, and the others
began to laugh. And that was that. We all ran into the warm water.

In all the rest of my time on St Jude, only one person ever made a comment on the mark on my chest.

Three years passed. John and Jim Chapman both left school and worked on Mr Chapman’s boat. I was fourteen, and a stranger would have taken me for a typical island boy: I wore the black pants, the white shirt, the black boots; my face was burnt by the sun. I spoke with the island twang. During those three years, I was happier than I could ever have believed. I had a home, I was part of a real family.

Yet, in spite of everything, I was still visited occasionally by that awful nightmare: I’d be standing at the edge of a great pit and the ground would start to crumble away beneath my feet. No matter how hard I tried to run away, I’d slip backwards. I’d feel myself slipping downwards, downwards, into a chasm so black I couldn’t see the bottom. Or sometimes, in the nightmare, I’d be standing at the edge of the pit, quite secure; then I’d hear footsteps running at me from behind and someone would try to push me over the edge. I’d wake up, sweating, and I’d lie there listening to the rigging of the boats on the beach jangling in the night wind. I’d feel such a sense of dread I couldn’t get back to sleep, even if I were brave enough to risk the nightmare again.

Near the end of spring in my third year on St Jude, something happened that made that awful feeling seem prophetic.

A
T SCHOOL
, I
WAS
becoming very friendly with Maria Hebblethwaite. Our friendship began innocently enough. Like me, she loved school and we’d talk about our homework. She was still a thin, solemn girl with a long face. Her fair hair hung well below her headscarf.

Doctor Hebblethwaite was always kind to me. He had a good collection of books, with encyclopedias and other reference works, in the room he called his library. It was beside his surgery on the ground floor. He encouraged Maria to bring me there to study. The room reminded me a little of Harry Greene’s cabin, though it wasn’t quite so congested.

Maria’s mother disliked me and made no attempt to hide it. If she answered the door when I came to study, she’d let me in without a word. But one night when I knocked on the door, she opened it and smiled—or, at least, tried to smile. That was a surprise.

“Maria’s finishing her dinner. She’ll be a few minutes yet,” she said. “Go on into the library.”

I went in and sat at the work table. A book was lying open, face down—a practice Doctor Hebblethwaite warned us against: he said it was bad for books. I was even more surprised when I saw the title:
The Anatomy of Melancholy
. That was the difficult book I’d seen in Harry Greene’s cabin all those years ago: the one whose author had hanged himself. I picked it up and looked at the pages where it was lying open. Most of them had been underlined—another practice Doctor Hebblethwaite disapproved of. I looked at the pages and was able to understand them. Either this was a more modern text than the one Harry had, or I was a better reader. At the
top of the first page, the heading was: “Symptoms of Love.” I began reading.